


A Gift Given in Secret

by HSavinien



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman Friendship, Crafts, Gen, Gift Giving, POV Nile Freeman, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:01:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29138967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HSavinien/pseuds/HSavinien
Summary: Everyone on the team makes things, creates for others in tiny ways that Copley certainly didn't track.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman
Comments: 12
Kudos: 61





	A Gift Given in Secret

They make things, Nile notices. Nicky and Joe cook. Joe has his drawings, books full of them hidden in every place they stay, scraps of paper filled with pencil and pen given away to passersby. Nicky plants the seeds from the vegetables he cooks and waters them until they establish or the team moves on, putting up a notice by the plants that says the equivalent of “fair game” in the local dialect. Andy - when she accedes to the idea of downtime - fiddles with wire and scraps of foil and fiber, turning out little animals and human figures, glinting and colorful. She leaves them in windowsills and on buses. 

Nile doesn’t spend as much time with Booker and it takes her a while to see him at it. It makes sense, as much as it surprises her. She’s driving through South Dakota when she notices him fidgeting in the passenger seat. He takes a piece of plain printer paper, folds it over and over itself and slits it partway down the middle with a razor blade. Booker twiddles the corner of the blade into the paper twice, then threads a string through the holes he made and knots it. He bends over it with a ballpoint pen and when they reach the rest-stop, she snags it while he’s in the toilet. It’s a tiny book, folded out of that one piece of paper, with a sketch on the front and a tiny story about a dragon written on the six pages inside. Nile carefully puts it back where she found it.

After he lets her see the first one, Nile notices it more often. Booker makes his little books when he has his hands free during travel or at night before he sleeps. Then he palms the tiny stories and drops them in the shopping bags of busy parents, leaves them in teddy-bear laps and flicked into backpacks. (Nile enlists him to help teach her knife throwing after watching that.) Some of the stories she recognizes - the better Grimms, variations on folktakes she heard as a kid - but some she’s pretty sure he makes up himself.

She finds one in her pocket after a bad job, about a princess with stars in her braids and a shield on her back. Nile reads it over and over, then takes careful pictures of each page and passes it to a little girl in New Jersey with her hair in puffs. When she heads back to Andy the next time, Booker gives her an envelope full. She slips them to kids who need them.

Nile has never been crafty, not like that, and it takes her until she’s redoing her hair with Nicky’s help to think of something. She only made about a thousand friendship bracelets between the ages of eleven and fourteen. She knows how to braid and there’s a lot of situations where having some string can be important. Nile stocks up on colorful cotton floss and sets herself to relearning.

**Author's Note:**

> You too can make a tiny book or zine out of a single piece of paper. http://experimentwithnature.com/03-found/experiment-with-paper-how-to-make-a-one-page-zine/#.YBhlgOd7mUk


End file.
